HELP.. Granddads watch

[eco8gator]

Nice watch.

Get it serviced at a good CW21 independent.

Not sure of your location but there are a few good choices people will recommend.

Jewelers on Time; Vanessa

http://www.rolexforums.com/showthread.php?t=328112

She is active on this forum and I think offers a discount to forum members...

Enjoy

[R.W.T.]

Originally Posted by Finally got one

Well an update. I wound the watch 20 to 30 times with no binding or grinding. I set the time and put the watch down for the night. When I picked it up this morning, the second hand was still moving and the time was correct. I think I'm going to wear it on my other wrist for a week or so and check / set the time and wind it on Sunday like I do my other watch. Maybe my Uncle never wound it up enough to get the spring under tention.

I appreciate everyone's inputs and help with this watch. I actually tried to look this thing up months ago and could never find an exact match. That is until mdw3 posted that link to eBay where someone has it going for $4100. I am still going to get it serviced, but like I said, Ima wear it for a week to see how it operates.

Once you wind it fully like you have it should keep itself wound with normal wear.

Very often people who aren't familiar with automatic or self winding watches are under the misconception that they can just shake the watch and go from a dead stop. Now in the case of the Seiko watches they were designed this way as you can't even manually wind some of them.

The Rolex and other watches are different. You need to start out fully wound and the autowind was only designed to keep it wound to a point where it would continue to run indefinitely after that if worn normally.

As I have spoken to before Wilsdorf was not interested primarily in making a watch that you didn't have to wind for convenience but rather trying to create a watch that kept more constant tension on the mainspring for...ACCURACY. If all things are ideal, a watch will tend to run slower at full wind because the amplitude or degree of swing of the balance is greater with greater power going through the train. As the watch winds down the amplitude becomes less causing the seconds to click off faster speeding the watch up at the bottom of the wind. On smaller watches with smaller mainsprings this was a decided issue in over all accuracy. A "sweet spot" in the regulation had to be reconciled in order to insure "overall" better time keeping. Still it was likely running slower in the morning and faster at night. The automatic winding mechanism keeps the mainspring tension topped up for the better 8 - 16 hours of normal wear insuring tighter tolerances for timekeeping.